I love Severance because the concept is strange, clever, and uncomfortably real. A work you and a real you, with less overlap than most of us would like to admit. So I sat with it and asked myself: where is the actual line? And what happens when it starts to blur?
One line from a piece I read recently stuck with me: "Some days you go home, and it feels like you played a different role all day." The way you spoke, what you laughed about, how you showed up in meetings. It does not line up with how you are outside of work. Or maybe it does not match how you actually felt that day. Maybe you were sad or just having a crappy day because of personal things going on, but you still had to put on the smile and play the part.
Research by Lakshmi Ramarajan and Erin Reid shows that employees constantly decide which parts of their non-work identity they bring into work and which parts they quietly leave at the door. Most of us do not call that identity management. We call it being professional. But the decisions are there. Every single day.
The part about private behaviour that I cannot stop thinking about
Most of us optimise for public performance. Very few optimise for private behaviour.
We are evaluated in public: meetings, Slack, performance cycles. Profiles are curated. Opinions are polished for an audience. So it is easy to believe that success is mostly about what people see.
But outcomes do not come from performance. They come from preparation. From what you read when no one is clapping. How you focus when there is no deadline forcing you to. Public confidence is usually borrowed from private habits. And when those habits are weak, the performance eventually cracks.
You do not rise to the level of your visibility. You fall, or climb, to the level of what you practise in private. That is the part that no algorithm rewards. And exactly why it matters most.
Here is where this connects to the work persona split: private habits do not only shape your productivity. They shape how you think, how you react, and how you treat people when the filter is off. Your private behaviour is the foundation your work persona stands on. If those two are not in some kind of alignment, people will feel it. Maybe not today. But eventually.
When the split stops being theoretical
While I was thinking about all of this, a case in Switzerland made the front page. A senior employee at a larger organisation was filmed at a private gathering making openly hostile comments about a certain group of people. The video ended up in the media. The company distanced itself and opened internal proceedings.
The public reaction was split. Many people said this was unacceptable. Others argued it was a private conversation, that he was entitled to his opinion, and that it had nothing to do with his work.
But if someone has responsibility for people, budgets, or decisions, can we really say that what they express about entire groups in private has no connection to how others experience them at work? Even when some of their colleagues belong to the group being talked about?
It is a workplace question. The split between public persona and private behaviour becomes genuinely relevant when it touches how safe people feel around you. That is psychological safety in its most basic form: can I take an interpersonal risk here without fear of consequences?
The people who cross from one world into the other
Some of my former colleagues are coming to my wedding. We went from weeklys and stress to actual friendship. From Slack channels to WhatsApp groups and dinner tables.
Who did I actually get to know first? Their work persona? Or them?
When you meet someone professionally, the first version you see is the edited one. The one who knows which jokes to make in which room and which opinions to keep for later. Over time, the real person starts to show through. You hear how they talk when they are not on. You see what they care about when there is no audience.
Sometimes those two versions are close. Sometimes there is a gap you did not expect.
Work personas are normal. But they are never neutral.
I do not think the answer is to bring every detail of your private life into work. That would be naive and, in some cases, unsafe. Not every opinion belongs in every room.
But a work persona is never just a neutral filter. It always does something.
When the distance between the work persona and the real self gets too large, the workday starts to feel like a performance. People report feeling drained after normal days. Disconnected from their own reactions. Unsure if they can be good at their job without acting a role.
That has consequences. For mental health. For trust. For whether someone stays or leaves.
And if public performance is built on private behaviour, then the work persona is not just a mask you put on in the morning. It is shaped by everything you do when no one from work is watching. Your reading. Your conversations. Your values when they are not being observed. The version of you that exists in private is not separate from the version at work. It is the source code.
Everyday versions of the same thing
It would be easy to treat the Swiss case as extreme. That would never be me. And for most people, the content is indeed extreme. But the pattern underneath? Closer than we like.
A colleague shares edgy memes in a private chat, then talks about psychological safety in meetings. A manager praises wellbeing initiatives in presentations, then jokes in private that only tough people can handle real work. Someone has a diverse personal circle but stays silent when exclusion happens in the team.
No villains. Just humans with blind spots and pressure, like the rest of us. But the gap between the work persona and the private behaviour is there.
Where this leaves me
I am not writing this as someone who has figured it out. I am writing from the middle of it.
I work in HR and recruiting. I care a lot about mental health in the workplace. And like everyone else, I have a work persona. I am more filtered in some rooms than in others. Sometimes I hold back and only realise later that I would have preferred to say more.
What the private behaviour piece added for me is this: it is not just about what I show at work. It is also about what I practise when work is not watching. Because that is where the real persona lives. The public version can only be as solid as the private foundation it stands on. James Clear puts it well in Atomic Habits: outcomes are a lagging measure of our habits. That is just as true for our character as it is for our productivity.
I do not have a step-by-step answer. What I do know is this: if the version of me at work and the version of me in private would give people two very different pictures of how I see others, then there is something I need to look at.
How big is the gap between your work self and the person you are when the laptop closes?